Older people tend to be richer because they’ve had more time to earn and save money. Compare a 20-year-old to a 40-year-old. Both spent about 20 years being a kid, growing up and going to school, but the 40-year-old had an extra 20 years after that to earn and save money. You can do the same comparison between a 40-year-old and a 60-year-old, but take all the money the 60-year-old earned in the first 20 years of working and invest it in the stock market for the next 20 years, while also continuing to work.

Wealth can build like crazy. If you invest at 7% average annual return, you’ll double your money in just over 10 years. At 10% the doubling period is just over 7 years. Now consider that the S&P 500 had an average annualized return over 10% between 1957 and 2023, and that 60-year-old’s 20 year investment would multiply by 6.7x.

Weight in pounds isn’t the right unit here. Weight varies depending on the strength of the gravitational field you’re in, whereas mass does not. A kilogram here on earth weighs 2.2lbs but on the moon it only weighs 0.36lbs.

Presbyopia is the age-related hardening of the lens and weakening of the muscles used for focusing. The process is progressive and irreversible. Lasik is not a good option for people with presbyopia and any surgeon recommending it is not acting in your best interest as a patient. You should probably seek a second opinion!

The 20 year warranty on Lasik doesn’t guarantee a lifetime of normal vision. The surgery can neither correct nor prevent presbyopia, the most common form of age-related far-sightedness. This reduction in vision is caused by a hardening and loss of flexibility in the lens as well as a weakening of the muscles used for focusing.

Honestly it’s a form of depoliticization because it’s not a serious proposal with any realistic chance of success. It distracts people from getting engaged with real politics and actually making a difference. And at the end of the day, isn’t that exactly what the billionaires want?

To him it’s just another day at the office.

Religion is a product of oral tradition, taboo, and superstition. These features of human behaviour played a valuable role in protecting humans from dangers we did not individually understand. Fires, lightning, floods, drought, poisons, diseases (especially sexually transmitted diseases) underlie much of the religious beliefs and other cultural superstitions you can see even today.

A favourite of mine is the processing of cassava aka manioc by indigenous Amazonian tribes. Their cultural practice involves a long, multi-stage cooking and washing process which removes the cyanide that is naturally present in the root. The amazing thing is that the cyanide levels are high enough to cause chronic poisoning but low enough to not present any short term symptoms besides a bitter taste. However, taking shortcuts with the process leads to a reduction in the bitterness without actually removing enough of the cyanide to prevent chronic poisoning.

This means that this cultural practice maintains a complicated process that can’t be immediately supported by the available evidence (bitterness) but nevertheless provides a strong protective effect against chronic poisoning. In the absence of modern chemistry, this complex practice could only have developed through a long process of cultural evolution selecting against tribes who suffer from the chronic cyanide poisoning.

Or maybe they could convince Trump that supporting Ukraine is good for them; good for a lot of American weapons factory workers.

Does anyone know what the timeline is for these cases? Seems to me like there won’t be enough time to finish these before the election.

Wow! I need to check that out myself!

The update prevents CrowdStrike from working. That’s a good thing!

CrowdStrike blew it. 3rd party vendors should never have the power to freeze or crash people’s computers through incompetent, untested updates!

• Castlevania: Circle of the Moon
• Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance
• Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening

You can see it all play out in a microcosm on reality shows like Survivor. People cooperate and compete. They cooperate TO compete. They cooperate when it benefits them the most, and betray each other when they think they’re most likely to get away with it. Some people are more trustworthy than others. Some are extremely likely to betray, but then they struggle to benefit from cooperation.

Groups of people engaged in a kind of eusocial super cooperation are very rare and tend to be fairly small. They also tend to act the most like a clique; being highly discriminatory against the outgroup.

Parked for how long though? Overnight or during the day? My belief is that an EV will perform much better in cold climates if you have access to indoor parking overnight, such as a residential garage or underground parking at an apartment complex. If you have to park overnight fully exposed to the outdoors with deep freeze overnight temperatures it’s going to be awfully tough on the battery.

But people are saying these batteries have built in heaters, so that’s pretty cool. I wonder how much power they’d use in that worst case scenario outdoor overnight freeze? Especially if you don’t have access to charging overnight and need to charge during the day at work.

Norway may be farther north than where a lot of Canadians live but it’s not colder. Where I live (Southern Ontario), it gets quite a bit colder than Oslo, despite being one of the warmer areas in Canada apart from the coastal regions.

It’s woke not because of what’s in it, but why. It’s performative politics. Token ensemble casts. Empty signaling. It’s not meant to make the world a better place, it’s meant to make money. It’s like cheap pride merch at Walmart.

As a Canadian and former campaign volunteer (and poll observer) this is really weird to me. Federal elections in Canada are always hand-counted. Results at each polling station are counted in front of volunteer observers from each party (as well as neutral observers) and then delivered to Elections Canada where they’re tallied (in front of lawyers from each party) and results are reported to the media.

It’s not a big deal and there’s no chaos.

You can’t pull up the ladder until after you get to the top.

I wasn’t sure of this issue with your argument but you’ve clarified it for me.

You’ve defined your way to a tautology. You’ve defined consciousness as ontologically prior to illusions and claimed the latter is necessarily dependent on the former. Thus it should not be a surprise to anyone that consciousness cannot be an illusion due to the definitional relationship you’ve created.

Unfortunately, this says nothing about the universe out there. It’s as controversial a statement as saying “all bachelors are unmarried.”

If I am asleep then I am unconscious by definition, yet I still experience dreaming.